Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory

CATHERINE QUOYESER The Antimodernist Unconscious: Genre and Ideology in The House of Mirth NY reconsideration of Edith Wharton's place in the canon of American literature must come to terms with the following anomaly. With a handful of other novelists, it is her distinction to have successfully negotiated the realms of high and mass culture at a time when their separation had become institutionalized. Published in 1905, The House of Mirth propelled Wharton to the front rank of American authors and broke all sales records at Scribner's during its heyday as a national best seller (Lewis 151). The body of critical opinion that has characterized Wharton as a "literary aristocrat" or antimodernist,1 out of touch with the main currents of twentieth-century American culture , cannot explain her popular following of 1905. Furthermore, it has tended to diminish the historical significance of her oeuvre. This paper is a contribution toward a fuller appreciation of Wharton's enduring claims on the present. There are several important precedents for such an undertaking. In the company of Henry Adams, Samuel Clemens, and William James, Wharton figures among the "dtamatis personae" of Jackson Lears' revisionist study in American cultural history, No Place of Grace (32223 ). Far from being "the death rattle of old-stock Northeastern elites unable to adjust to a raw new industrial civilization," the antimodetnism of these fin-de-siecle artists and intellectuals "helped to revitalize familiar bourgeois values and eased the transition to new ones" approArizona Quarterly Volume 44 Number 4, Winter 19Í Copyright © 1989 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 004-1610 56Catherine Quoyeser priate to an emerging consumer culture (xvi). In reacting against the erosion of "family, craft, community [and] faith" undet cotporate capitalism, antimodernists unexpectedly reinforced their own sagging cultural authority (xviii). A numbet of literary historians have adopted similar perspectives on Wharton. Wai-Chee Dimock, for example, has explored the portrayal of the cash nexus in The House of Mirth and its debasement of human relations. Mote recently, Amy Kaplan has interpreted Wharton's early fiction and non-fiction as a kind of "metaphor" (443) for her ambivalence toward the commercialization of authorship. Both inquities proceed from particular emphases in the "alternative" or Continental tradition of cultural sociology, from the premise that art "reflects" (in Dimock's case) or "mediates" (in Kaplan's case) "pre-existing social material" (Williams 24). My own reading of The House of Mirth employs a more sustained formal analysis on the assumption that literary forms—the most promising basis for establishing the "relative autonomy" or "specificity" of literature—alter social matetial. Through its shifting generic commitments , the novel enacts a symbolic revolt against and a "Utopian compensation " (Jameson 42) for the atomizing effects of corporate capitalism . At the same time, these commitments reveal its implication in the matketplace. They are so many narrative contracts, by turns executed and dissolved in the attempt to address a mass readership with the voice of cultural authority. No one has yet sounded the novel's full genetic range, or sought an explanation of that range in the contradictory demands of a mass market. Furthermore, a persistent emphasis on Wharton 's "bleak" or deterministic vision (from Nevius to Lindberg, from Howe to Dimock) has obscured the novel's ideological ingenuity and the sources of its appeal. Wharton observed of her fiction that "my last page is always latent in my first" (G^nce 208). This remark suggests a plan for my own analysis. Chapter 1 of The House of Mirth serves as a kind of cross section of its generic affiliations—realism, natutalism, sentimentalism, and melodrama—which can then be traced in their interaction. The novel opens in Grand Central Station, where Lawrence Seiden encounters Lily Bart. Having missed her train to the Gus Trenors' country estate, she prevails on him to "rescue" her for a few hours. He The House of Mirth57 obliges by inviting her to tea in his apartment. Narrated largely from Selden's point of view, the chapter recounts his "speculations" about Lily. She stood apart from the crowd, letting it drift by her to the platform or the street, and wearing an air of irresolution which might, as he surmised, be...